Home
by Vaughntronic
Summary: Now he was in a hidden corner of a dark corridor, his body was coming undone and his breath was threatening to hold forever until he shook so violently that it spewed out of him forcefully in ragged and wracking gusts. He wasn't crying. He wasn't sobbing. He was dying. (One-Shot. Warnings: Character Death, Suicide. Please read with caution!) **Cover by Wil1969**


**AN: Inspired by Dido - Here With Me**

Merlin closed the doors to the throne room as he bowed out; "Yes, your Majesty."

He turned and paced down the halls like he was in his own slip stream of time. The people around him were blurs while he felt he was standing still, though his feet carried him... Somewhere. Occasionally, one of the blurs was put on pause in front of him long enough for him to see the look in their eyes. Pity. Loss. Despair. This was the worst threat Camelot had faced in all his time here, and he could no longer bear the faces of its people. All looking at him. All screaming at him.

He was elsewhere now. He turned his dream-like head and a new face was put on display. Leon. The knight offered a small but strained smile and Merlin's eyes slid off his face to the empty cot next to him. A flash of long brown hair, careless eyes, and a gravelly voice made its presence known somewhere in Merlin's memories. Merlin turned away from Leon.

Now he was in a hidden corner of a dark corridor, his body was coming undone and his breath was threatening to hold forever until he shook so violently that it spewed out of him forcefully in ragged and wracking gusts. He wasn't crying. He wasn't sobbing. He was dying.

His magic tried. It fought for him. Then against him. And now it had abandoned him. It was dormant somewhere, closed and locked away behind the place in Merlin's soul that was still fighting to protect him, but failing.

Their names kept creeping up on his mind, trying to take him by surprise, but he pushed them back. All of them. He could not think them. Could not say them. Would not.

A bed now. He was cold. His body, still harboring some autonomic self-preservation that his heart and mind did not share had curled itself up. He was sleeping, but he wasn't. Was he ever sleeping? Was he ever awake? Was he forever lost? _Yes..._

He stared at the candle burning slowly in front of his eyes and he imagined that the candle was in his chest, slowly burning down to the wick until it went out. God he wanted it to go out. He wondered idly which candle would win. The one on the inside or the one on the outside. He hoped the one on the inside would. Any light that was left in him felt like a joke. A hoax.

* * *

He stood, trying to blink the cloudiness from his eyes. Straining to see what was beyond the thin veil of his sight. He was not moving, and he was not even sure he could move. He did not fear it, though. There was no fear here, and no pain. Just stillness and an unrelenting desire to focus on the veil that hovered before him.

His eyes searched the muddied pictures and then will a thrill of horror - and more pain than he had ever felt in his life - he felt chained. Bound and tied to something beyond the veil, and the white hot pain was so great that he thought it must be physical harm coming to his body... But... He had no body. How can a body that does not exist hurt so violently?

Merlin.

The source of the pain. As if his non-chest had been non-opened and with a great cleave of a non-weapon his soul had been torn into two equal parts. One lay shivering and abandoned in his non-body and the other had fled to meet with its counterpart - Merlin. But he could not reach Merlin, and the souls were being kept from each other by some cruel circumstance. Death. His death.

At once the veil cleared an opening. And while that opening was frayed around the edges, blurring out images of his non-life, one image came into sharp focus and his eyes burned with non-tears. The curled and staring form of Merlin laying in his familiar bed, in his familiar chambers, in his familiar castle.

That was all it took and he stepped through. But didn't. Not entirely. This was death taunting him. Letting him get closer to rejoining his soul, but keeping him apart from it.

He was on the edge of the bed, a non-hand reaching to touch the frail and sharp shoulder of his... Life. The name died on his non-lips and his fingers gained no purchase against the cloth covering the huddled man's skin, but he stayed nevertheless.

* * *

Merlin turned to his other side, the candle on his bedside table was betraying him and burning down faster than his internal one. He reached a hand out in the space on the bed that he was curled around. The empty space in the cavity of his chest where his heart was supposedly still beating had seemed to expand outside of him. It swathed him in a cocoon of heady grief. His hands gripped at air, but his eyes were malicious and images were now swimming in front them.

A red shirt, a cold bracelet, a ring that his fingers brushed against. Golden hair and fair skin framing what must be an ocean of blue, somber and unblinking. A small necklace that rested between his collar bones. The image smiled at him, and almost produced a voice that Merlin was sure would have been laughter.

This image, supposed to be a pleasant memory of... _No please, I can't do it_... Did nothing but tear through him, and just as quickly as it had come, all his careful walls, and great barriers that kept his name, his voice, his memory at bay broke over him.

There was a hand at the back of his head, cold chainmail pressed against his chest, and then a voice carried through, subdued but unmistakably his... The tone and timbre was like coming home... A warm blanket of familiarity that cloaked Merlin... In merciless pain.

_'Just... Hold me.'_

And then the candle. It went out. But it was not his candle. It was someone else's, and the backlight behind the oceanic eyes was snuffed out. And baldly, without warning, the name escaped the confines of his mind and rattled its way through his chest and burst through his lips in a scream that would have broken the sky.

As it was, it broke him, and the scream echoed through the castle stilling its occupants in a moment of silence for the tortured servant and his lost soul... Arthur.

* * *

The water lapped at Merlin's bare feet as he stepped in without pause. This. This here was his answer. And as if he should have known it all along, he proceeded onward. The water embraced his legs, his hips, his chest, his shoulders, and his toes gripped the soft sand and stones at his feet.

His head dipped below the black surface, and he felt warmth. Contentment and exhilaration. He smiled into the deep as he let his body go, the water sucking into his mouth. He drank it down thirstily, parched from his grief. The same grief that held him under, weighing him down to the bottom where he could see nothing and feel nothing but the slow seep of liquid dripping through his lungs. He closed his eyes tight, and ignored the gasps as his body involuntarily seized and jerked, his cells still laboring under the delusion that survival was optimal. But he knew better and he obstinately beat them into submission as the last bubble of his last breath warbled to the surface.

* * *

Gaius crumpled a small note in his shaking hands.

_"I'm... Sorry.."_

The soul of Camelot was completely lost.

* * *

Merlin felt the grip of a strong hand around his wrist. He was being pulled... Through time? Through water? Through consciousness? He was not sure, and before he could really get a handle on the answer it was over, and he blinked against the blinding light piercing his eyes.

The light was diminished greatly when something stepped forward blocking its path, and Merlin looked into the face of his King.

Home.


End file.
